


Aurelia

by KChasm



Category: Pokemon GO
Genre: Field Research, Friendship, Gen, Human/Pokemon Relationship(s), I mean friendship, Isekai, Melancholy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 06:57:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16656361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KChasm/pseuds/KChasm
Summary: Blanche, pokémon research, pokémon themselves, and a man who doesn't know any of the above.





	Aurelia

She returns to field research, as she always does whenever things become complicated. It’s calming, routine—and Professor Willow doesn’t mind, even if she’s not fully sure he understands. He is content with data. He would be content _without_ data, even if she only told him she had learned something.

(The professor has always had a laissez-faire attitude toward rearing assistants, but she can’t complain—especially when the free rein allows her to away as she wishes. She loves Spark and Candela, but sometimes she needs to go somewhere quiet and build herself up again.)

This month, she’s watching caterpie in Ilex Forest. These ones should evolve, very soon—though she has to admit that her estimation is as much guesswork as anything else, considering the variation in metamorphic stage length across regions. Still, if her intuition serves her well (and she can _not_ allow Spark to ever know she thought that) she should be able to collect some interesting data.

That should excuse her absence.

* * *

In her notes, the caterpie don’t have names. She refers to them in the order that she saw them—Subject One, Subject Two, Subject Three, and so on.

It’s not just professionalism. Giving something a name—a pokémon, a person, a place—too often colors observations with the observer’s initial impressions. A pokémon nicknamed something innocuous, such as “Wriggly,” is afterward viewed through a lens of “Wriggly-ness”—so to speak. It creates bias, and leads to faulty conclusions.

For example, the caterpie Blanche hasn’t nicknamed “Wriggly” _is_ wriggly, certainly, but she’s more than that. “Wriggly” implies a habit of twisting oneself—Wriggly has more a habit of laying herself straight when at rest. It implies meandering—Wriggly, on the other hand, seems to prefer shorter paths, straight lines from point A to point B. It implies squeamishness, and Wriggly isn’t that at all. In fact, Blanche would call her the first among the group to investigate new changes and arrivals.

To refer to her as “Wriggly” would be a disservice.

It’s the same with the rest of the caterpie. The one Blanche hasn’t named “Boxer” is the one most prone to playfighting, but he spends most of his time still, watching over the others. The one that isn’t named “Sleepy” frequently sleeps, even in the daytime, but appears more lively and energetic than the others when awake. The one that isn’t named “Leery” was the last among the caterpie to remain cautious of Blanche after she began her observations (they all noticed her immediately, of course), but is friendly enough now—Blanche’s seen her hanging off branches, always tilted in her direction, as if to say to her, “Hey! Look what I can I do!”

It’s Leery’s behavior that shows the paradox: If Blanche wants to study pokémon behavior, she has to observe them—but observing a pokémon often causes their behavior to change. She can keep her notes as carefully as she wants, but if these pokémon are aware of her—and they are, obviously—it’s a mystery whether anything she writes has any value.

Then, one morning, she wakes to the high-pitched squealing of alarmed caterpie and finds that this point has been rendered completely moot.

She’s out from her tent before she can begin to consider the pros and cons of investigation (she has grown too attached to her subjects, some might say—fine, Blanche can admit her failings), but when she finally runs across the state of affairs, all she can do is stare. The caterpie are unharmed (thank goodness), but they seem to have discovered an intruder—and dealt with him, in caterpie fashion.

The man on the ground has been cocooned, neck to foot, in caterpie thread, his legs bound together, arms to his sides. The caterpie that Blanche was so concerned about a second ago sit perched upon his stomach and legs, squeaking to each other, as if arguing over what to do now that this man has actually been _caught_.

The man in question cranes his neck backward with obvious discomfort. His smile is afraid.

“Hello,” he says. “Could you please help me?”

* * *

The man is dressed more for the office than the woods, blue buttoned dress shirt and loafers and nothing in the way of proper equipment. He is a mismatch to his environment, an outlier. What he’s doing here, Blanche can barely begin to guess.

The man can’t guess, either. He curls tighter into the blanket Blanche has given him and says that his name is Eino. And then he tells Blanche that he can’t remember anything else, including his surname, what he was doing, and how he got into the forest at all.

“You seem to be taking it very well,” says Blanche. She doesn’t know if she believes him or not.

Eino’s smile wavers at the edges, like a band stretched. “By the time I thought about it, I was already caught,” he says. “There were a lot of things to be scared of at once—and I was afraid those worm things were going to eat me. Thanks for saving me—a lot.”

His word choice is curious. “‘Worm things,’” Blanche says. “Do you mean the caterpie?”

The caterpie gave up apprehension long ago, while Blanche was still looking for her spare jacket and something to start a fire. They’re crawling about her side of the fire now, across from Eino—clearly curious (Wriggly and Leery especially), but clearly not curious enough to draw too close too quickly. Every now and then one of them looks from her to him, as if waiting for her judgment in this matter.

Eino, however, gives very little to judge by—just a look of blankness save the smile, and: “‘Caterpie’?” he says.

It seems odd, for him to have never heard of caterpie—but Blanche catches herself. Not everyone is a researcher, after all. Even without traveling overseas, there are enough towns and other settlements that just happen not to intersect with regional caterpie distribution. It’s perfectly reasonable that a person could live their entire life in such a town and never suspect that this kind of pokémon existed at all—a person like Eino, apparently.

“You weren’t entirely off base in your description,” Blanche tells him. “The caterpie is categorized as one of the worm pokémon—though its later evolutionary stages leave the appellation behind. It’s primarily found in forested areas such as this. My current goal is to record an entire holometabolic cycle as part of a larger study on factors that affect pokémon evolution.”

Too late, she realizes she’s slipping into exposition. A bad habit—“Professor Mode,” Spark calls it, but at least he listens, usually. Most people don’t.

When she looks at Eino, though, he’s nodding, leaning toward her—as toward as he can, with the fire between them. His eyes are lit with interest.

“What’s a pokémon?” he asks.

* * *

Eino, it seems, is from very far away.

* * *

Blanche’s observations are tainted—or will need a large caveat attached, when she sends her report to Professor Willow. Her presence as the observer notwithstanding, she’d intended to bring a minimum of variables with her.

To which she’d succeeded, technically, but she suspects she won’t be able to use this particular metamorphic cycle as a model anyway.

The intelligent action to take, of course, would be to contact the nearest authorities, medical or otherwise. There are enough accidents that happen with psychic pokémon that specialists exist for people who have had their memories tampered with (and though there’s nothing to solidly say that Eino’s amnesia has been afflicted _upon_ him, his vivid and internally consistent recollection of a _world without_ _pokémon_ seems evidence enough, in her own opinion). At the very least, she should contact Professor Willow—whose guidance she _is_ working under—and inform him of the latest developments.

She can do it easily. She has a phone. There is signal.

She does nothing, instead. Perhaps it’s only the fallacy of sunk costs, but surely there must be _something_ that she can recoup from this development. Something that needs her here to see it.

(Something to keep her from returning to Professor Willow’s lab, just yet.)

If Eino notices that she’s put off their return to more human civilization, he doesn’t say anything. He seems content enough, spending time between sitting inside her tent and outside by the campfire. He hasn’t even complained about being bored, which actually raises him above most of the co-assistants she’s worked with.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a sandwich—of all things—hovering tentatively beneath her eyes. She follows it back to the man holding it toward her. When her eyes meet his, he flinches—but then leans it back inward again.

“Your, uh, phone—”

“Pokégear,” Blanche corrects, and Eino flinches again.

“Right. Your pokégear said that it was nearly lunchtime, so I made you a sandwich—like the ones you made, yesterday.” He seems to realize, after a second, that he’s run out of words to say, and the sandwich falters.

She takes it, more to save him (again) than her actually being hungry yet. “Thank you,” she says, and takes a bite.

She feels her brow furrow. She doesn’t recognize this filling, which is especially concerning, taking into account the fact that she packed all her supplies herself. “Strange,” she says. “What did you use for the filling?”

“Oh, I wanted to use the jam you used yesterday, but I couldn’t find it,” says Eino. He bites into a sandwich of his own and stops, there. Blanche can see him rolling the taste of it in his mouth before swallowing thickly and continuing. “I ended up using that spread you had set out—the one with the picture of the, uh, caterpie on it.”

Blanche stiffens. “That would be the feed _for_ caterpie,” she says, around her mouth.

“Oh,” Eino says, again. He peers at his sandwich, his smile thinning slightly. “That’s...it’s not poisonous, is it?”

“It is not,” Blanche says. The lump of feed in her mouth is a thick _presence_.

Eino nods. “I thought that was the funny animal on the packaging,” he explains, and then carefully takes another bite.

Blanche excuses herself so that she may properly spit and drink a full day’s worth of water.

* * *

Eino actually turns out to be a competent cook, once it has been made clear what is meant to be eaten by who. Blanche almost feels guilty, for working him without pay, but he seems to enjoy the task. She watches him methodically chunk a potato, humming a wordless tune she doesn’t recognize.

The caterpie watch him, too.

They’ve taken to him—the caterpie—quicker and more comfortably than they did for her, which is a data point she keeps finding herself returning to, for its potential anthrozoological value alone. Even by the time Eino appeared, there were moments between her and the caterpie when the caterpie would _tense_ , suddenly, as if wondering if it were really fine to act as they were. If perhaps interacting with this strange human wouldn’t be unwise, after all.

Now the caterpie swarm excitedly about Eino’s shoes, looping around and between, rearing up occasionally to crawl at his pantlegs, and if there’s any tensing there to see Blanche’s missed it.

She’s not envious. It’s just interesting.

“The caterpie are comfortable around you,” Blanche says, later, when they’re both sitting at the fire again. Her bowl of stew steams in her hands. It smells different than usual—more appealing—even though it’s the same cheap base she’s always bought.

Eino smiles unsurely, and the caterpie on his shoulder (Wriggly, Blanche notes) turns itself into his neck, as if sensing his discomfort. “They’re nice,” he says. “Though I think it’s thanks to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think once the caterpie realized _you_ were alright with me, they decided they could be alright with me, too. So—they were looking up to you for guidance, is what I think.”

Blanche looks at Wriggly, who pauses her nuzzling to look back across the fire at her. Her gaze is still, wide and unblinking. If there’s anything said by it, Blanche doesn’t know.

Then Wriggly turns inward, burrowing itself into Eino again.

“That’s a hypothesis,” Blanche says, and closes her eyes into her stew.

* * *

The fact is, the caterpie like Eino, or at least something that can’t be told apart from “like.” For better or worse, they’ve formed an inseparable company—to watch the caterpie, then, is to watch Eino as well.

Blanche divides her notepad into columns.

Eino, she notices, is easy to please, unusually so for the full-grown adult he appears to be. The caterpie huddle, humming among themselves in their caterpie language, and Eino sits on his haunches, peering over them, as if he can discern some meaning in it. He walks after Sleepy, who seems unconcerned with the titan plodding after her—five minutes later, a laugh pulls her away from her notes, and she looks up to find that Sleepy has turned the tables, chasing after Eino now, though of course Eino has to walk less than even a leisurely pace to avoid certain escape.

She watches, her pen hanging, leaving a bullet point on the local pidgey population incomplete.

What is she still doing here?

* * *

“It’s really different here.”

They’re sitting across the fire again, drinking the same stew. Blanche’s lost track of days. Not properly—her notes still know, and she can look at them, if she wants. But if she doesn’t think about it too deeply (which is difficult), she can _almost_ convince herself that this has always been this way. That she has always been in this forest, and never heard of Johto or universities or professors who collect samples without apparent methodology but somehow manage to pull field-changing conclusions out of them regardless.

It doesn’t frighten her. She doesn’t like it, for how much she doesn’t hate it, but she isn’t _frightened_.

“Did you live in a more urban area?” she asks, to fill in the void.

Eino shrugs, his smile crooked. In his lap, pouched against his arm, Boxer stirs, but doesn’t seem to wake.

(They’ve become lethargic, of late. _Now_ , Blanche is sure—the chrysalism is close. It must be.)

“That’s not what I meant,” Eino says. “It’s the pokémon. I told you, didn’t I? That we don’t have any pokémon, where I come from.”

His memory is incomplete, by his own admission—but it’s an argument they’ve passed between them enough times already. “So you’ve told me,” Blanche says, instead.

Eino nods. Blanche suspects he knows what she isn’t saying. “Just animals,” he says.

And _that_ point is almost as aggravating. “I still don’t understand the difference you’re trying to explain,” Blanche says. “Surely, if they fill the same ecological niches, there’s no significant difference.”

“There’s a lot of difference,” Eino says. He shrugs again, deliberately, this time, as if to present the weight he’s carrying to her. “Today—this one, this caterpie—we played hide-and-seek together.”

He stops there, as if that explains it all.

It doesn’t.

“Boxer.”

“What?”

It comes as a quiet surprise to Blanche to realize that she’s said it out loud, but she doesn’t let it show on her face, or at least doesn’t think that she does. “That’s what I’ve been calling him,” she says. “‘Boxer.’”

“‘Boxer’...” Eino tries the word on his tongue. It fits, there. “Today, I played hide-and-seek—with Boxer.”

“Yes, and yesterday you let the four of them take turns riding on your shoulder as you ran. I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“But that’s it, right?” Eino says. “‘Hide-and-seek,’ ‘take turns’—back where I come from, you might be able to hide-and-seek with a dog, if it was smart, or maybe a parrot. But not a caterpillar, or a _worm_.”

And _there_ is the part she still doesn’t understand, because there isn’t very much to separate a caterpie from a growlithe. Type, obviously. Habitat, diet. But nothing to say one should be able to play games while the other shouldn’t.

“Why wouldn’t a worm play hide-and-seek?” she asks.

“It isn’t smart enough,” says Eino.

“He clearly is.”

And Eino nods, his smile growing, as if he’s happy to be proven so clearly wrong. “Today I played hide-and-seek with Boxer,” he says, “and you say that _all_ pokémon are like this. Like human beings—I mean, as intelligent as human beings. They _all_ understand this.”

It’s a statement, factually true, and Blanche can say nothing to it.

Eino’s eyes seem to see something very far away. His smile is beatific. “It’s like a story, or a dream,” he says. “You can be friends with anything.”

* * *

And the worst part is that Blanche can almost understand—almost, but not quite: That she must have looked like this, or felt like this, at some point, long ago. _Everyone_ must have felt like this, once in their lives—realized, or had it realized to them—

_We are not alone in the universe._

_There is someone we can share it with._

She must have realized. But she couldn’t have been anything but very young, when she did, and now the memory has been lost to her.

She can’t get it back.

* * *

Eino stands in the clearing, arms out, face tilted up, as if trying to catch the sun’s rays. The butterfree perch over him—on his wrist, his shirt, his shoulder. Wriggly has chosen his face for herself, clinging gently, white-patterned wings unfurled to hide him from Blanche’s view.

But she can hear him laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

Blanche listens, and doesn’t give a name to this feeling.


End file.
